Posted
by
BeauHDon Tuesday May 01, 2018 @11:30PM
from the messy-bedroom-computations dept.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: Researchers are proposing an idea to make your computer bigger. They are suggesting an extreme and awesome form of co-processing. They want to turn your entire house into a co-processor using the local Wi-Fi signal. Why, you may be asking, do we even want to do this in the first place? The real answer is to see if we can. But the answer given to funding agencies is thermal management. In a modern processor, if all the transistors were working all the time, it would be impossible to keep the chip cool. Instead, portions of the chip are put to sleep, even if that might mean slowing up a computation. But if, like we do with video cards, we farm out a large portion of certain calculations to a separate device, we might be able to make better use of the available silicon.

So, how do you compute with Wi-Fi in your bedroom? The basic premise is that waves already perform computations as they mix with each other, it's just that those computations are random unless we make some effort to control them. When two waves overlap, we measure the combination of the two: the amplitude of one wave is added to the amplitude of the other. Depending on the history of the two waves, one may have a negative amplitude, while the other may have a positive amplitude, allowing for simple computation. The idea here is to control the path that each wave takes so that, when they're added together, they perform the exact computation that we want them to. The classic example is the Fourier transform. A Fourier transform takes an object and breaks it down into a set of waves. If these waves are added together, the object is rebuilt. You can see an example of this in the animation here.

And just like all other science which sounds like a bullshit waste of time when it is done it may also yield some new understandings of how interacting radio signals can be used for practical purposes.

Sidenote: Does anyone know of a news for nerds site? I'm looking for a site which specialises in technology and has an interested readership. All I can seem to find is a bunch of negative luddites who are more interested in blaming the entire world on governments.

I COULD extend my old Tampermonkey script to hide all of thr annoying people, or only show comments from people in my whitelist.

I made it years ago to make that ADP or whatever guy disappear from my browser. That guy who could never understand why in 1982 the world switched from hosts files to DNS. Seen that dude lately? I vanished him with Tampermonkey about three or four years ago.

My kingdom for your Tampermonkey script. I only signed up for an account because I thought it would have basic features to block KGIII and apk. One of them is gone, but would easily replace with many others.

And just like all other science which sounds like a bullshit waste of time when it is done it may also yield some new understandings of how interacting radio signals can be used for practical purposes.

Bullshit.

What this article claims is that complex calculations (like fourier transformations) can be computed, and their results captured, based on carefully controlling the interaction of WiFi (or other RF) signals. I suppose it could be argued that this could create a form of analog computer, but the article implies that any calculation might be fair game, up to (I assume) mining crypto currency.

Bottom line, they seem to be proposing that we take several small processors, use them to carefully modulate/re

Bottom line, he seems to be proposing that we take a bunch of vacuum tubes and wires, use them to carefully modulate/regulate the voltages in a bunch of other wires and tubes to perform otherwise trivial calculations?

Taking one thing to make another thing is called 'invention', taking something and and making it do what it was already designed to do is also called 'invention', but only if you are a student named Ahmed, live in Texas and you 'invent' a digital clock by taking it out of it's case and putting it in a pencil box.

Most wifi routers come with multiple antennas onboard now. What makes this moronic in my opinion is that the transistor count to handle all that waveform lifting is going to exceed the count to simply perform the operations. Not to mention the RF interference this system is going to cause.

"I don't know about that. Lots of places have wifi right now and have for over the past decade."And it does cause interference already.

"Going from random to not random isn't going to change anything related to how interference happens."

Yes it is, it's going to change the density of transmission. Random means there is no consistent loss. It's like an analog tv broadcast, random noise degrades the picture but it is scattered throughout the image causing fuzz that has to be extremely severe to prevent you from

Well whatever entity is claiming authoritative control is responsible and liable for all outcomes in their declared territory. Such as a trade-off for controlling all is now your fault. However you're right everything has gone political lately that's probably because from people noticing the all the tech is pointless and politics and business interests sabotage implementing it properly in basic infrastructure.

As a RF/Microwave design engineer of 20 years I found the summary and article to be pretty incoherent.

As best I could discern that gist of things through the mangled technobabble and hype the argument is that if you can fully map an interference pattern between two sources you can then perform some calculations by measuring the resulting new interference pattern between two new signals. I sort of see what they are going after, but many details are lacking as to who you make this work.

I will just install a quantum computer emulator on my microwave and be done with it.. then it can send its magic quantum waves directly to my computer and it can turn it into a rainbow colored unicorn that resembles a my little pony.

They propose using several computers to regulate RF emissions and an additional computer to detect/analyze the resulting interference to perform a calculation that could be performed trivially by any of the individual computers in the experiment.

People want 4K. But don't have the skills to review and then buy a new GPU and CPU to support that.
So the small trendy low power computer can pass the complex math to other devices and they can push the results back.
A huge increase in real time CPU and GPU power with no lag is the result.
Modern computer math magically no longer needs the CPU and GPU to be in the same part of the house.
The networked refrigerator, toaster and air conditioner CPU will all get the complex GPU math done with no lag.
Dropp

People want 4K. But don't have the skills to review and then buy a new GPU and CPU to support that.So the small trendy low power computer can pass the complex math to other devices and they can push the results back.A huge increase in real time CPU and GPU power with no lag is the result.Modern computer math magically no longer needs the CPU and GPU to be in the same part of the house.The networked refrigerator, toaster and air conditioner CPU will all get the complex GPU math done with no lag.Dropping frames again with that more advanced computer game? Turn on the networked washing machine and do some laundry to add more CPU power.

don't be stupid. read this proposal again. this is way more sillier than that.

this is basically turning your house, with use of wifi signals, into a fft analysis machine or something similar, like a huge mechanical computing device except with wifi instead of levers.

The end of the first paragraph in the post states "But if, like we do with video cards, we farm out a large portion of certain calculations to a separate device, we might be able to make better use of the available silicon." What I was expecting at that point was an idea in distributed computing. Your processor idles down or else is overwhelmed by a high bandwidth task, so it offloads portions of the job to your refrigerator, cell phone, tablet, washing machine, other desktops. you car, etc. - anything that can be accessed by IoT or peer-to-peer networking or whatever. That makes sense, kind of, if you are doing supercomputing tasks or cryptocurrency mining at home.

However, this turns out to be an idea about using multiple wifi antennas to create interference patterns from which FFT's can decode the dataset - kind of a wifi holography. The problem is that anyone who moves the desk or couch, leaves their bicycle in the room, puts a metal kitchen bowl on a table, turns on a laptop, has their Aunt Tillie sitting in the wrong place, or even just wears a tinfoil hat to tune in or tune out other strange ideas will trash the computation.

It used to be that with relatively few TV channels and finite numbers of radio stations and newspapers, that news could be filtered or curated to things of genuine significance. Now, with seemingly unlimited media outlets, any idea or premature utterance can become "news". A century ago, we fantasized about going to the moon, and then it happened. Just half a century ago, we fantasized about handheld computers and wrist watch televisions, and then it happened. So, ideas can come to fruition, so we cannot be too dismissive. This one however seems to be a big "so what", and "what the hell would one use it for?"

I'm also wondering about the real-world use of all this. Adding waveforms together is really just that - adding. It seems that asking some waves to do some algebra or trig seems like a bit too much to ask. So I wonder how much processing you could really offload with this...?

There are a lot of reasons this is a terrible plan but that isn't one of them. It has been proven that every logical operation can be performed with negated binary addition. It may not be the most efficient way but it can be done.

So... as I said in the comment you responded to, this is a terrible idea but the flaw is not as suggested by the GP that the modification to waveforms is addition.I said "... this is a terrible plan... It may not be the most efficient way" You seem to be rephrasing the same sentiment I express but with a tone implying it is somehow an argument against what I said.

By the way, if we are talking about using universal logic operators rather than this wifi radio proposal on the whole you should be aware that for

If I were the funding agency, this would be reected instantly. You can heat your house better by doing random switchings of transistors rather than this round about way.
It would have been better if these researchers were honest in their request. I am not even sure they have any case or even trivial computation like Fourier transform through their method.

We blew past 128-bit computing (or at least, 128-bit registers with 64-bit data bus and 48+ bit address bus) YEARS ago (ok, technically, the general-purpose registers RAX through R15 are "only" 64-bit... but the MMX registers ain't just for graphics anymore). Sandy Bridge bumped us up to 256-bit registers. Knights Landing raised that to 512 bit registers (AMD's best processors are comparable, and I think they doubled the number of huge registers from 8 to 16).

Why, you may be asking, do we even want to do this in the first place? The real answer is to see if we can. But the answer given to funding agencies is thermal management. In a modern processor, if all the transistors were working all the time, it would be impossible to keep the chip cool.

Because there is simply no way to cool a modern CPU with it's millions of active transistors!

Apparently this research was approved by people that never heard of thermal paste and cpu fans.

Because there is simply no way to cool a modern CPU with it's millions of active transistors!Apparently this research was approved by people that never heard of thermal paste and cpu fans.

Each CPU core is broken up into a number of functional units. Different CISC instructions are broken down into multiple micro-operations, which are executed on functional units. Each core can handle one or two contexts at once, meaning that it's working on retiring one or two instructions at a time, which in turn means that it's got one or two functional units active at a time. Modern transistors are very good both at resisting and conducting, but they still have a state in between where they are doing both

Uh, no. No, that's not it at all, electromagnetic waves don't interact with each other. When they collide with matter the sum of their energy is imparted to the thing they're colliding with, with the sum being affected both by the amplitude and phase of the waves relative to each other.

Ignore the sensational Ars article (which is kind of shocking in itself) and look at the paper. The actual proposal is less "use your house as a coprocessor!" and more, "one of the limiting factors in optical computing resear